Sun Jul 23 2006 20:00Ruby Cookbook Promotion:
The Ruby Cookbook is either available or almost available, depending on who you ask (Amazon sales rank right now: an amazing 7230; incidentally, authors, I have a small script that records and graphs a book's Amazon rank, since I know you're all obsessed with that). So it's time to start promoting the sucker.

I wrote an article for the O'Reilly Network (which I think is technically not part of O'Reilly, somehow) about how we tested the code in the Cookbook. Which I should nudge the editors about. Lucas lives in Portland, so he doesn't have to pay for a plane ticket to go to OSCON and talk peoples' ears off about the book.

My ill-formed plan was to do a virtual book tour: guest-post on technical weblogs about the coolest recipes from the book. Other people have done this in the past, notably Greg Knauss, but I don't think it's been done with a technical book before. And I never actually emailed anyone about doing this, so it's probably too late now. I got an invitation to join the O'Reilly Ruby group weblog, so maybe I'll just post once a week on there about one of the cool recipes.

Does anyone else have ideas for book promotion? I want to focus on my current project but I should set aside some time for selling what I've already written.